Hi all, I'm relatively new to the Linux experience, moving on from Windoze... and determined to... so ... please be patient

I had my share of newbie problems and managed to fix them (dual boot mainly, thanks to yann for the help) and now I'm a bit baffled and stuck not knowing what to do.

All of a sudden I'm having these totally random freezes, I think it might be related to an update from yesterday.Is there any way to find out what exactly got updated, is there a log file or something somewhere, and how can I eventually revert to the previous version of whatever got updated?

Also is there a good update guide available around here, so I can choose a conservative update plan?Only fix what needs to be fixed for example. I have to keep this machine running as I depend on it for way too much to experiment with unnecessary things that can cause stabilty issues like this.

Been running fine for several weeks, had a very rare freeze, but now it's rendering my machine almost useless.Have to do a hard reboot and if I'm lucky 10 seconds later it happens again!

Happens in Opera, my main work horse, but also in GIMP... heck.. even the desktop has crashed on me!Sometimes it seems the mouse (scroll?) is causing it, sometimes it happens when I want to open a menu.Doesn't seem to be related to anything in particular (not audio related or something as I saw in some other posts).

I don't know very much about fixing this, but for me (on a previous version) freezes went away when I added the boot parameter "nomodeset" to GRUB.

I really have no idea if this is the same problem I had, and I cannot explain to you what exactly it does (roughly: it has something to do with the kernel trying to access the graphics card, which is stopped by this parameter), but it's so easy to try out that I dare recommend it.

Just hold Shift on start-up and edit the GRUB line for your boot, and see what happens. Any changes you do there are only for the next boot, so you can't break things. If it works, you'll need to edit GRUB for a permanent change.

teilnehmer wrote:I don't know very much about fixing this, but for me (on a previous version) freezes went away when I added the boot parameter "nomodeset" to GRUB.

I really have no idea if this is the same problem I had, and I cannot explain to you what exactly it does (roughly: it has something to do with the kernel trying to access the graphics card, which is stopped by this parameter), but it's so easy to try out that I dare recommend it.

Just hold Shift on start-up and edit the GRUB line for your boot, and see what happens. Any changes you do there are only for the next boot, so you can't break things. If it works, you'll need to edit GRUB for a permanent change.

Good luck, I hope this helps!

Thanks teilnehmer I'll try that.

But you remind me of something I didn't mention, and that might be connected, I changed the GRUB config (etc/default/grub) last night, to have the boot up select screen in a lower resolution.I just removed the comment # and left it at GRUB_GFXMODE=640x480 and did a grub-update. Is it possible that this is causing/affecting this issue? Instead of an update/upgrade?

After I upgraded the kernel, I had to reinstall the (old) nvida driver [Settings -> Additional Drivers menu], and I had to run xfwm4 and save the xfwm4 session [Settings -> Session and Startup menu] to make sure the windows manager works properly.For the rest it all worked like a charm, fortunately for a noob like me.. and I bookmarked upubuntu.. as a very useful site, nice and helpful guy too by the way.